The present invention pertains to artwork manufacturing technology and more particularly to a method for forming patterns by vacuum coating.
At present, the method for applying surface coating to plastic and glass products to form a desired surface pattern is as follows: first, applying surface coating to the entire surface area of the product; and then forming the desired surface pattern by means of printing, corrosion and so forth. For example, the Chinese patent application no. 200610170656.3 discloses a vacuum coating device for forming laser patterns on base material surface, and method and finished products thereof. The polycarbonate base material or the acrylic base material is put into the vacuum coating device; then silicon oxides and titanium oxides are evaporated onto the base material surface to form a coating layer; the obtained base material surface is disposed with a pattern layer by printing on the other side without the coating layer; and a color layer is disposed on the coating layer. For products obtained by said method, when the base material is irradiated by light beams, the coating layer refracts the light beams and thereby attaining a visual effect which shows various colors and refraction of light and shade. However, said method could not obtain hollowed-out patterns in a fast, precise and environmentally friendly manner.
In the present vacuum coating methods such as evaporating, sputtering, molecular beam epitaxy and so forth, the coating device usually uses a single and fixed coating source. However, such device can only process one product at a time. It is therefore low in processing efficiency and cannot satisfy the needs of massive production.
For the existing laser etching technology, generally etching starts right after importing the pattern data and calculating and adjusting the pattern data based on the product surface data, such as curvature, roughness and so forth. However, the pattern formed will suffer from deformation; the precision is low and the effect is poor.
For products obtained by means of existing technology, the coating layer is always on the external surface; while products which are coated on the internal surface thereof with a coating layer with hollowed-out pattern are not yet available.